Why is my texture rendering in a different position than it shows up when in texture view?
By default, Blender uses 'Generated' Corrdinates for placing textures on objects when rendering with Cycles. In the viewport however, when you have Cycles selected as a render engine, the texture node which is selected will be previewed on the object using the currently selected UV map. That's why you see it mapped correctly in the viewport, but mapped in a different fashion in the rendering.

Now I don't know why you were told that Blender would not unwrap correctly using the UV map node, but anyways: Use either a Texture Coordinates Node and plug the UV output to the 'Vector' input. This will use the UV map from the object which is currently marked as 'renderable' (yellow circles in screenshot). Or, you use the UV Map node. Here you can choose the name directly, but remember that if you rename the UV Map later on in the mesh data, you'll need to update the input field in the node as well (red circles).